The Angel Makers
The
ANGEL
MAKERS
Copyright © by Jessica Gregson 2011
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gregson, Jessica, 1978–
The angel makers / Jessica Gregson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56947-979-7
eISBN 978-1-56947-980-3
1. Women—Hungary—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3.World War, 1914-1918—Hungary—Fiction. 4. Women murderers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.R44493A84 2011
823’.92—dc23
2011024928
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my grandmother, Laurette, and in memory of my grandfather, Clem
Contents
Although this book is based on a true story, events have been heavily embellished by the author’s imagination. Names and places have therefore been changed.
Thank you to all my early readers (you know who you are), especially to Katy Anchânt, Rachel Coldbreath, and Germán Guillot, who provided much needed enthusiasm, encouragement and proofreading early on.
Thank you to all my friends, especially to Carlie Dawes, Jo Black, Kate Jones, Zavy Gabriel, Yogi Raste, Sophie Mc-Innes, Angela Hughes, Sarah Cook, Leda Glyptis, Anne Pordes, Sarah Moore, Nich Underdown, Mary Macfarlane, Helen Finch, and Judith Logan.
Thank you to my family, especially to Richard and Julia.
Thank you, Mark.
Thank you, mum and dad.
She never answers, but still, I talk to her all the time. Listen, I tell her. I’ve made mistakes. When it first started, sometimes I would try to pretend that I was helpless in all of it, that I’d been buffeted by fate; that as surely as those eight women are twisting in the wind now, in my way, I’ve been twisting in the wind my whole life. It’s not true, though; it’s just a lie that I told myself when I wasn’t feeling strong enough to face up to what I am, and what I’ve done. In truth, I’ve made my choices, and my hand is strong in all of this. Without me, none of this would have even started.
I’m twenty-eight, but I look older, and that doesn’t even come close to how old I feel. That’s not so unusual where I come from. In the city, I’ve heard that women are cosseted and coddled, treated like elaborate ornaments or playthings. Here, we carry our parents and our husbands and our children on our backs; we’re the dumping ground for all of life’s shit. Judit taught me that early on, and nothing I’ve gone through since has gone any way towards disproving it. They used to wonder why I was still alive; in the villages, people regularly kill themselves over less than I’ve endured.
When I was small, maybe eight or nine, Katalin Remény, aged sixteen, drowned herself because she was pregnant without a husband. She was hauled out of the river – at a time when bodies in the river were far rarer than they have been recently – and at her funeral her body was paraded through the streets, surrounded by howling mourners, but of course she had to be buried outside the churchyard because of her sins, and later, Judit and my father went to pour boiling water over her grave, to stop her from stalking the village in death, as suicides are said to do.
Judit came to speak to me a few days after Katalin was buried, and I remember she was hissing and spitting with fury: she told me that what Katalin had done was pointless and meaningless, that having a baby without a husband was only a sin in the eyes of those people who want to control women, and that, in any case, if a woman ever found herself with a baby that she didn’t want, she could always come to Judit and Judit would take care of it – though, at that age, I only had a vague idea of what ‘taking care of it’ meant.
Like with most of Judit’s rages, it was born out of a desire to protect me, and it worked. Katalin took up residence in my mind, a symbol of the opposite of everything I was going to be; a mindless, sacrificial lamb, caring more about the opinions of a few stupid villagers than her own life. I knew that I would never give up my own life if there were any alternative left to me in the world, and as it’s happened, I could never be accused of failing to seek out as many alternatives as possible.
That’s at the root of it all, I explain to her: my survival instinct, my will to live. That’s behind all the choices I’ve made. I could have given myself up at any number of points, and I suppose it would have saved lives. But not
my
life, and not her life, and that’s all I’m looking out for. I’ve learnt that it’s too painful and dangerous to care about much else.
Is it odd that I feel like this, given the twenty-eight years I’ve had? Maybe I should have accepted the bitter slice of life I got as something easy to surrender. But once I got it between my teeth, I was never going to let it go without the most violent struggle. What’s good about life? Ask me that when you’re watching a summer moon, bloated and white, floating over the plain. Ask me that when you’re looking into my child’s face. Of course, there are terrible things too, and sometimes – often – they outweigh the good. But you can’t have beauty without a bit of terror.
Sari is fourteen years old when they carry her father out, carry him through the village lanes, his face bare and blank to the wide sky, carry him through the summer wildflowers that bloom alongside the river, carry him to the cemetery. It is a public end for a private man, infused with the drama that makes village life bearable; a final chance to be the centre of attention, something that Jan Arany had never sought. Sari doesn’t cry, because that isn’t her way; instead, she wraps a cloak of silence around herself, and lets the other village women do the wailing for her. Her silence almost gives the impression of absence. It is misleading.
Her father had been a Wise Man, respected, a
táltos
, and they’d lived for all of Sari’s life on the outskirts of the village, in a wooden house with steps that creaked, the grass in front of it worn thin by the feet of villagers in search of cures, help or salvation. Her father had been a big man, tall, broadshouldered, light-haired – unusual in that place – a wide face like the sun, Sari thinks: warm, but remote. The villagers had loved him and feared him in equal measure. They just fear Sari.